There's the wonderful urban legend that the advertising slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation!" was mistranslated in China as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead."

Allegedly, the expression "Out of sight, out of mind" was once translated from English to Russian, and then back into English. It became "invisible idiot", which makes sense really.

As of October 2009, trying this with the Babel Fish online translator yields the utterly incomprehensible result "From the eyes down, from the heart there."note It got translated into the equivalent Russian idiom (which literally means something like "away from the eyes, out of the heart") and then word-by-word back into English.

And now, in 2013, it becomes "But it's not."

There's an apocryphal story of the Chevy Nova failing to sell in Spanish-speaking countries because the name transliterates into "No Go" in Spanish. In truth, the English word "Nova," in Spanish, means...Nova. (The two-word-phrase "no va" would indeed mean "doesn't go"— but it's accented totally differently. The myth is equivalent to suggesting a dining room set from Ikea failed in English speaking countries because it was named "Notable.")

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